Sunday, 23 March 2014

An update on NWAP

By Owen Jones (Writer of Words)

Sometimes I like to imagine that someone actually pays
attention to my musings on No Work, All Play. I’d like to think that somewhere,
someone is wondering why I never followed up my promises to review mods (mainly
Amnesia Custom Stories) on a regular basis, but I know they don’t. So I wrote
this article, because I like pretending.

Perhaps I’m simply trying to justify myself, after all I’m
the one who loses out by not posting reviews. I don’t suppose it really matters
why I’m writing this, only that I am writing this, and that we have a lot to
talk about, you and me.

I don’t know who you are or where you come from; hell I
don’t even know if anyone is reading
this. I might know you, I might never even recognise you exist, and yet here we
are, discussing games reviews. I’m writing this in the present (or at least my present) and you’re reading this in
the present (or your present). Though
this present will be gone and perhaps even forgotten by the time you read this
it’s still as real as your present. In a way this is breaking down the
boundaries between our presents (not the woolly socks type) and allowing just a
small amount of my ideas and opinions to be transferred to you. These ideas and
opinions will change, more to the point I’ll
change, but in a way a record of this me (the present me) will still exist and
can communicate with someone (more specifically, you) across the gulf of time
and space, as pretentious as that seems. And that’s amazing, even if it is
about something as mundane as the ‘present’ me’s laziness.Look, my point is writing is amazing. Stephen King (to whom
No Work, All Play owes our title) once described writing as telepathy, and
yeah, that’s pretty accurate. The truth is it doesn’t matter what I think about
gaming (or any subject, really). The very fact that we’re communicating in itself is amazing, and that’s
reason enough to do it. As I’m sure I’ve made clear I find this is amazing, and
I love writing. Which is why I feel bad about not having posted anything in a
while. Which is why I’m writing these very words.

And I also love videogames. Sure, they’re narratively
imperfect and have a long way to go before they can compete with mediums like
literature or even films, but that’s what’s going on right now. Video games are
still a relatively new medium, and are still developing and finding their
voice, and that’s something that can’t be seen in any other medium. Only now
are games starting to push the boundaries of what makes a ‘videogame’ and
realise their full potential as a form of interactive media, and I find that
fascinating. I want to be a part of that development, even if it’s by doing
something as small as writing my thoughts about why videogames deserve to be
talked about. Which, you’ll note, is what I’m doing right now.

So why haven’t I posted anything in a while? There are a
whole load of excuses for me to choose from, but what good would that do us?
Let’s just put it this way, time continued its procession and I failed to keep up,
resulting in a lot of things that I wanted to do ended up not getting done.
Like this blog for instance. And now I have to make sure that I do post stuff regularly,
or I’ll end up feeling bad and slightly disappointed with myself. Sure, I could
say that I’m busy and have exams coming up and I’ll start writing stuff more
regularly later, but then I run the risk of never actually doing it. And you
know what they say, there’s no time like the present, even if all time is a present (just not this present).

And this also gives me an opportunity to explain how my
posts will differ in the future. There’s no point in me posting traditional
reviews, because whether you buy/play a game shouldn’t be determined by what
some bloke on the internet said. Besides, I can’t tell you whether you’ll like
something or not, I can only say whether I liked something or not. I can say
what a game did well and what it didn’t do well, but at the end of the day it’s
how you personally react to the game that matters. So instead I’ll be
concentrating on just giving my thoughts on games, whether that’s my opinion or
interpretation on a particular game or on games in general. And I’ll try to
concentrate on the more obscure stuff, stuff that won’t get as much coverage elsewhere
around the internet.

I wasn’t sure where I was going with this post, and I’m
still not too sure where I did go. Still, I felt that I needed to let the world
what was going on with NWAP, even if the world wasn’t listening. So thanks for
reading all of that, you really didn’t have to. But hey, seeing that you’ve made
this far you might as well stick around for a while. You never know, you may
well find it to be worth your while after all...